Author: wamdiness

Trivium have released the original music video for their 2005 single Dying In Your Arms, and with it a reaction video where the band watch it for the first time in 20 years.

In a clip uploaded to the Florida metalcore four-piece’s YouTube channel, they reveal that they filmed a Phantom Of The Opera-esque video for the Ascendancy song, but that it never aired because their manager demanded them to pull it.

Upon revisiting the abandoned video, the band enjoy many laughs at the expense of their late teenage selves. “This is either the end of our career or the beginning of a new chapter,” singer/guitarist Matt Heafy laughs while introducing the clip.

They go on to rip into everything from their postures while filming to the period costume and their hairdos. “I don’t remember my hair ever looking like that!” Heafy moans. “It looks like it got blasted, like I drove in a Corvette!”

He goes on to ask regarding the footage in general: “What’s that show? Downton Abbey! It’s like a Downton Abbey murder mystery!”

Watch the full reaction video, and the original Dying In Your Arms cut, via the players embedded below.

The unveiling of the original Dying In Your Arms video is part of Trivium’s ongoing 20th-anniversary celebrations for Ascendancy. The band released the breakthrough album in March 2005 and, within months, played a famous set at the UK’s Download festival and appeared on several magazine covers.

Trivium are co-headlining a world tour with Bullet For My Valentine, who are celebrating 20 years of their debut The Poison, and are currently in the middle of the North American leg. Both acts are playing their respective 2005 albums in full.

Metal Hammer attended the London date of Trivium and Bullet’s tour at the O2 Arena back in February and awarded it a near-perfect four-and-a-half stars.

“Two of the 2000s’ greatest metal albums got the victory laps they deserve, stuffed with high-end production and audience goodwill,” wrote journalist Matt Mills. “And, perhaps even more importantly, both bands proved that they can shine in a setting this huge, planting the seeds for a future that holds even greater triumphs.”

See the remaining shows of the tour below.

Trivium and Bullet For My Valentine 2025 tour dates:

Apr 23: Grand Rapids GLC Live at 20 Monroe, MI
Apr 26: Chicago Byline Bank Aragon Ballroom, IL
Apr 27: Detroit The Fillmore Detroit, MI
Apr 29: Pittsburgh Stage AE Outdoors, PA
Apr 30: Philadelphia The Fillmore Philadelphia, PA
May 02: Boston MGM Music Hall at Fenway, MA
May 03: Laval Place Bell, Canada
May 04: Toronto Great Canadian Resort, Canada
May 06: Washington DC The Anthem
May 07: New York The Rooftop at Pier 17, NY
May 09: Bethlehem Wind Creek Event Center, PA
May 11: Nashville The Pinnacle, TN
May 13: Corbin The Corbin Arena, KY
May 14: Atlanta Coca-Cola Roxy, GA
May 17: Charlotte Skyla Credit Union Amphitheatre, NC
May 18: Raleigh Red Hat Amphitheater, NC

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Prog and Metal Hammer, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Guitar and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

Ozzy Osbourne is physically training in preparation for his final show.

The Prince Of Darkness will grace the stage for the last time, both as a solo performer and with his pioneering heavy metal band Black Sabbath, at Villa Park in his hometown of Birmingham on July 5.

Talking with his friend and Billy Idol guitar player Billy Morrison on SiriusXM, Osbourne says he’s doing “heavy training” for the swansong show. He adds that returning to the stage after the multiple surgeries he’s had in recent years “really is like starting from scratch”.

When Morrison asks about his regimen, the singer explains: “Well, it’s endurance training. The first thing to go when you’re laid up is your stamina, so believe it or not, I’m doing two sets of three-minute walks and weight training. I’m going and going, you know?”

He continues: “I’m waking up in my body, you know? I mean, three minutes to you, for instance, is nothing, but I’ve been laying on my back recovering from umpteen surgeries.”

Black Sabbath embarked on a farewell tour from 2016 to 2017 and Osbourne’s last full-length solo set was at Ozzfest at The Forum in Inglewood, California, on December 31, 2018.

In early 2019, the frontman was hospitalised with complications from the flu and postponed the remaining dates of his No More Tours II run. He later cancelled the tour outright after falling in his Los Angeles home. It was revealed in 2020 that Osbourne had also been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

In 2023, Osbourne retired from touring, but his wife/manager Sharon announced plans for a farewell Birmingham gig as early as January 2024. The event, Back To The Beginning, was confirmed this February. It will mark the first time the original Sabbath lineup – Ozzy, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler – have shared the stage since 2005.

The Back To The Beginning bill will be rounded out by a who’s-who of heavy metal. Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Slayer, Anthrax, Gojira and many others will perform. There will also be a ‘supergroup’ composed of Billy Corgan (The Smashing Pumpkins), Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit), Papa V Perpetua (Ghost) and many others. Tom Morello (Rage Against The Machine) is acting as the event’s musical director and famed actor Jason Momoa will host.

In February, Ozzy revealed that he’s not doing a full set with Sabbath and will instead perform “bits and pieces” with his bandmates. “I am trying to get back on my feet,” he said. “When you get up in the morning, you just jump out of bed. I have to balance myself, but I’m not dead. I’m still actively doing things.”

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Prog and Metal Hammer, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Guitar and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

In 2018 The Damned guitarist Captain Sensible told Prog about his failed attempt to tell the world about psychedelic Canterbury experimentalists Egg – and confirmed he still loved their three albums.

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“Back in the 1980s I participated in a Radio 4 show with Paul Gambaccini, where my fellow panellists extolled the virtues of their favourite musical pieces. A smattering of posh jazz and something orchestral later it was Egg’s turn to shine – except the backroom idiot cued A Visit To Newport Hospital right from the start!

They played a one-minute clip of my favourite track, but only the mind-bending stoner fuzz intro was aired. After that, enthusing about sumptuous melody and time signature wizardry was always going to fall on deaf ears.

On and on I droned about the dreamy ambient passages, the fusing of pop, jazz and rock, the spectacular variety of tones and textures from nothing more than a transistor organ and a couple of effects pedals… I wasn’t invited back.

I first experienced the joys of Egg at a school chum’s in the early 70s. His parents had one of those new-fangled stereogram affairs – a rare commodity at a time when most records were pressed in mono.

When his folks weren’t about we’d wrestle the speakers out and position our heads between them for a trip into a psychedelic universe that was a million miles away from lessons and homework.

Analysis of the lyrics indicated that Dave Stewart, Mont Campbell and Clive Brooks were living the alternative lifestyle that we aspired to – if only we didn’t have to wear these damn school uniforms.

Dave had a good laugh when I told him all that when we met in a recording studio a decade later. He’d had the big hits with Barbara Gaskin by then; mighty pop arrangements showing he’d lost none of his creative skills.

I remember trying to persuade him to get the Farfisa organ and fuzz units out and do some gigs playing that beautiful meandering Egg material again. I’d be first in the queue for tickets if it happens.

Their albums – Egg, The Polite Force and The Civil Surface – contain vast symphonic soundscapes that merge effortlessly from Bach to Hendrix in a couple of crotchets, despite having been recorded by a trio. Many would assume the fuzz-drenched keyboard riffs come from a guitar, but there are none. He’s a clever bloke, is that Dave Stewart.”

Contributing to Prog since the very first issue, writer and broadcaster Natasha Scharf was the magazine’s News Editor before she took up her current role of Deputy Editor, and has interviewed some of the best-known acts in the progressive music world from ELP, Yes and Marillion to Nightwish, Dream Theater and TesseracT. Starting young, she set up her first music fanzine in the late 80s and became a regular contributor to local newspapers and magazines over the next decade. The 00s would see her running the dark music magazine, Meltdown, as well as contributing to Metal Hammer, Classic Rock, Terrorizer and Artrocker. Author of music subculture books The Art Of Gothic and Worldwide Gothic, she’s since written album sleeve notes for Cherry Red, and also co-wrote Tarja Turunen’s memoirs, Singing In My Blood. Beyond the written word, Natasha has spent several decades as a club DJ, spinning tunes at aftershow parties for Metallica, Motörhead and Nine Inch Nails. She’s currently the only member of the Prog team to have appeared on the magazine’s cover.

Heriot’s Debbie Gough has revealed the surprising impact of Billie Eilish on the metalcore brutes’ music.

Talking exclusively to Metal Hammer, the singer/guitarist names Eilish as one of her favourite singers. She adds that Eilish’s song Goldwing, from 2021 album Happier Than Ever, was a “reference point” for the track Visage on Heriot’s full-length debut Devoured By The Mouth Of Hell.

“I really, really, really liked the intro with all the vocal layering,” Gough explains. “I thought, ‘Ooh, that would be cool to try and apply in a metal context.’ It might not translate in that way now that the track’s finished, but that was at least the initial idea. I love her music and it’s definitely an influence on Heriot, with the softer songs that we have.”

Talking further about her appreciation for Eilish, Gough says: “I think she’s amazing! I think she’s got such a dreamy voice. I really like how she plays around with vocal production as well.”

Heriot released Devoured… to rave reviews in September 2024. Metal Hammer journalist Dannii Leivers awarded it four stars and wrote: “The spectre of Nine Inch Nails stalks the beat of Lashed, while tracks such as Opaline and Visage – wrapped in clean, shoegazey melodies and dreamy vocals – mark a new frontier for what we should expect from extreme music. Heriot’s future is very bright indeed.”

Heriot have played shows with the likes of Architects, Lamb Of God and Fit For An Autopsy and have just wrapped up their first headlining tour of the UK. The band have a handful of festival dates set for the summer, including performances at 2000 Trees and Bloodstock Open Air in the UK. See their full gig calendar here.

Watch the full interview with Gough, where she name her five favourite vocalists of all time, below.

Louder’s resident Gojira obsessive was still at uni when he joined the team in 2017. Since then, Matt’s become a regular in Prog and Metal Hammer, at his happiest when interviewing the most forward-thinking artists heavy music can muster. He’s got bylines in The Guardian, The Telegraph, NME, Guitar and many others, too. When he’s not writing, you’ll probably find him skydiving, scuba diving or coasteering.

Dennis Wilson made his name as a member of the Beach Boys. But in 1977, he broke away to record a lone solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue. In 2008, Classic Rock looked back on the making of a cult classic – and Wilson’s tragic death six years later.

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Dennis Wilson, second born of the famous Wilson brotherhood, was the soul of the Beach Boys. Sure, Brian Wilson was the genius, the mastermind without whom they’d never have got out of their Hawthorne garage. Pudgy Carl was the organiser. Cousin Mike Love had the ambition and drive while schoolfriend Al Jardine represented their moral, clean cut code. Dennis was the real deal.

The favourite son of tyrannical father Murry, no one ever imagined Dennis amounting to much other than drumming and exciting the Beach Boys’ female fans. A rugged surfer dude, he epitomised their image but was never the quickest witted fellow. “My little brother Denny? He’s a little dumb,” Brian told anyone who asked.

At least that’s how it was in the 1960s. In the 1970s everything changed. Dennis became the enigmatic, philosophical Beach Boy who released a solo single with Daryl Dragon as Drumbo (geddit?), starred in the cult buddy road movie Two-Lane Blacktop with hip Apple singer James Taylor and then broke out of the fold. His 1977 solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, is now given the same reverence as landmark Boys recordings like Pet Sounds, Surf’s Up and Holland.

The genesis of Pacific Ocean Blue begins during a typically tumultuous time in the Beach Boys’ bizarre career when Dennis is hiding out with some groupies in Seattle. Despite the brilliance of Holland, recorded in Baambrugge in the Netherlands due to chronic tax problems with the IRS, the Beach Boys have hit a slump. Not only are they broke, they’re playing greatest hits medleys for students who despise them. Unable to fuse their new progressive music with a back catalogue that then seems terminally old, one night in 1972 they support the Grateful Dead and are booed off.

Shaken, Dennis calls up an old pal, a 29 year old Italian American all-rounder called James William Guercio. He’s shared stages with the Beach Boys as bass player for Chad & Jeremy, going on to play lead guitar for Frank Zappa, then manage Chicago and Blood Sweat & Tears. He has also directed and produced and written the score for the awesome cops and bikers movie, Electra Glide In Blue, a cynical rebuttal of the whole Easy Rider mythology.

“The Beach Boys were baby shit when Dennis called,” Guercio tells Classic Rock from Caribou, his Colorado ranch-cum-recording empire. “No one’d touch ’em. It was frustrating to see ’em fuck up. They were getting five thousand a night. No sell outs. No production. No show plan. I had Chicago making $100,000 a night, and selling millions of records. I knew that wasn’t right.”

Dennis pleaded with Guercio to move in and usurp then manager Nick Grillo. They worked by stealth. First Jimmy replaced the South African bassist Blondie Chaplin, then he took over the controls working on an 18-month strategy that restored the Beach Boys status, enabling them to reclaim what he called “the legacy of American music”.

By 1975 Guercio’s strategy of playing 168 consecutive one-nighters paid off. The Beach Boys supported Chicago and ended up blowing them away. There were repercussions. “One night I’m looking round and the Chicago wives and girlfriends are on one side of the stage, the Beach Boys women are on the other side – as usual – except one person has moved across,” Guercio chuckles. This was Karen Lamm, estranged wife of Chicago vocalist Bobby Lamm.

“There was obvious tension. Dennis was insisting ‘Man, I love this chick, she’s so great’ – which she was, everybody wanted a piece – and there’s Bobby glowering and pretending it’s cool. It got tense. Chicago trashed their dressing room while the Boys’ room is a haven, with Mike Love doing his Maharishi shit. There were a helluva lot of drug issues and bad feeling in the air. I wasn’t committed to Chicago. I was committed to Dennis.”

With his new muse and soon-to-be third wife Karen Lamm-Wilson goading him on, Dennis went to work. In between the fisticuffs and slanging matches that typified his relationship with her he began to play Guercio cassette demos and gave him impromptu live renditions of his new melodies “in hotel bars, on aeroplanes, at soundchecks. I heard it all”.

Guercio ordered Dennis to finish the material, bringing in mutual friend Gregg Jakobson to provide lyrics and structure, and signed the pair to his Columbia-bankrolled label Caribou in the summer of ’76. Dennis’s super subtle songwriting had blossomed. The templates were struck on Be With Me – for the 20/20 album – and Forever – on Sunflower. He’d contributed Only With You and Steamboat to Holland, then soared towards orchestral nirvana with Cuddle Up and Only With You for the overlooked Carl And The Passions.

The dreamlike quality of these songs and the 76/77 sessions that became Pacific Ocean Blue represented Dennis’s soulful side. By contrast he was a notorious hell raising womaniser who’d lost his virginity aged 12 and christened himself ‘The Wood’ – always hard and ready for action.

It was that Dennis who opened the door of his rented house on Sunset Boulevard on an innocuous day in spring 1968 to find one Charles Manson and Family sprawled about. Manson and his army of acid popping nubiles moved their schoolbus, emblazoned ‘Hollywood Productions’, onto Dennis’s lawn and took over with a lethal mix of drugged debauchery, orgiastic sex and mumbo jumbo.

They infiltrated themselves so thoroughly into Dennis’s world that the Beach Boys were persuaded to record one of Manson’s ditties, a macabre number presciently entitled Cease To Exist. Wilson and Jakobson enjoyed the sickness but were savvy enough to change the title to Never Learn Not To Love, and adapt the key line to ‘cease to resist’. They had no trouble getting the Boys to put it on the B-side to their Bluebirds Over The Mountain single. Charlie was weird but he knew a lot of girls.

Dennis referred to Manson as ‘The Wizard’. He told England’s Rave magazine “He’s got so many great ideas… he’s fascinating… a real thinker. I like him a lot.” He was less enamoured when Manson one day pulled a knife on him in his own kitchen. “I could kill you now Dennis,” his house guest gloated. “Go ahead then muthafucker,” replied the host, promptly collecting a few belongings and moving out to a hotel.

Although Dennis managed not to provide testimony following the Tate/LaBianca murders carried out by the Manson Family he did tell reporters “I want nothing to do with that man. He’s a sick fuck. A major arsehole… I mean he cut their tits off and everything.”

Not a nice Wizard.

A decade later Dennis had problems of his own, exacerbated by a prodigious vodka and cocaine habit and his volcanic life with Karen. During early recordings of Pacific Ocean Blue she unloaded a pistol given him by Guercio into the side of his three day old black Mercedes. “That shook him up” Guercio laughs. “‘Look what she did, man! Three bullets in the passenger side.’ Then he forgot it. They were both, er, a little crazy.”

Another time he ignored her she threw a brick through the plate glass doors of the Beach Boys Brother Studios. It was recovered, tied with ribbon and framed above the legend ‘The Karen Lamm-Wilson Memorial Brick.’ When she wasn’t pouring bottles of booze over the console, Karen was more helpful; she added vocals to the album and co-wrote two songs.

Recording POB wasn’t easy. Guercio and Jakobson recall flushing Dennis’s stash down the toilet with alarming regularity. “But it was often a real pleasure too,” recalls Gregg. “During daylight hours he was more or less coherent and conscientious. He wasn’t big on writing words, so he needed collaborators, but his music was fantastic and he had plenty of lyrical ideas.”

An essay submitted on a favourite topic at Hawthorne High School in 1961 – he was expelled at 16 for throwing a screwdriver at a fellow pupil – illustrated his naive poetic sensibility. “Sports car racing is very dangerous” he wrote. “Just think, you’re going about 120 miles per hour down a curved mountain road, then you have to make a hard right or left. The main thing is you have to keep your eyes on the road, not in the deep blue sky.”

Released in September ’77, Pacific Ocean Blue (working title Freckles) developed his nature boy character. Art direction was provided by old friend Dean O. Torrence (of Jan & Dean fame). They went to Maui for the shoot. “Both the setting and Dennis were very photogenic,” Torrence remembers. We went for an everyday, snapshot approach. He was a pal so it was like a vacation until Karen turned up. She was just around, like Yoko Ono. A real coupla handfuls. They both were. One night she told Dennis I was having an affair with her. Which I wasn’t. He liked her intensity and the chaos. Made him feel in love.”

The beatific tone of the music informed Torrence’s approach. “He always had a dommed surfer look, kinda glazed, wanting to be someplace else, even when he’s in paradise. But he was also heaps of fun. We shared a Go-Karts business, Race ’Em, Break ’Em & Wreck ’Em. He liked living on the edge, or over the line was even better.”

Pacific Ocean Blue gained rave reviews on release, selling 200,000 copies – much to the Beach Boys annoyance. But Dennis didn’t find fulfilment. He continued writing and recording in a frenzy for what became Bambu – unreleased until 2008 – named after his favourite rolling papers, although by now Jakobson was exhausted and left the technicalities to engineer John Hanlon.

On New Year’s Eve 1977 Dennis and Karen took heroin together for the first time, beginning a woeful trajectory that would see him being kicked out of the Beach Boys. Frequent spells in rehab couldn’t turn him around. He divorced Karen, remarried her, divorced her again and then shacked up with wife number five, Mike Love’s daughter Shawn.

Throughout the early 80s, Dennis was drifting in and out of relative destitution. Large royalty cheques were squandered in week long drugs and drink binges, short lived sports cars and ne’er do well hangers on. He was forced to sell his beloved boat, the Harmony, weeping when it went at knock down in auction.

A few weeks after his 39th birthday Dennis was back on the water on friend Bill Oster’s boat – the Emerald – moored at Marina Del Rey. It was December 28th and the Pacific Ocean was chilly and grey. By late afternoon Dennis was stoked. He’d downed a bottle of his favoured Delray vodka and gone diving, fully clothed, hoping to recover possessions he’d thrown overboard during the turbulent last days with Karen.

After three fruitless attempts he emerged clutching a smashed silver framed photo given to him as a wedding present by the man he called Jimmy G. “It was a beautiful Tiffany piece I gave them along with the silver handled 9mm pistol she shot up his car with,” says Guercio. “He was so ecstatic he dove in again.”

What happened next, according to the story Carl Wilson told Guercio, is that “Denny hit his head on the bottom of the boat and got concussed. He was such a good swimmer and such a jock, even though he was alcoholic. He came up three times gasping for help. The others thought he was goofing around. He wasn’t.”

Against the wishes of Shawn, Dennis’s ashes were buried at sea, following the intervention of former girlfriend Patti Reagan. In a moment of black farce Shawn requested the Police song Every Breath You Take be played at the memorial service because it was Dennis’s pop song du jour. That idea was nixed and Farewell My Friend from Pacific Ocean Blue blew its haunting melody over the weeping mourners

And so the death of a Beach Boy came in a watery grave, although Dean Torrence wasn’t overly surprised. “Actually, I thought he’d OD, or crash his car. Having surfed, sailed, fished and drag raced on Daytona Beach with him all those times I didn’t think he’d drown. But he wasn’t a happy man. The odds were against him in life and in love. The thing is, if you keep on stomping on the floorboards, one day they’re going to give in.”

Originally published in Classic Rock 124, September 2008

Max Bell worked for the NME during the golden 70s era before running up and down London’s Fleet Street for The Times and all the other hot-metal dailies. A long stint at the Standard and mags like The Face and GQ kept him honest. Later, Record Collector and Classic Rock called.

April 29, 1991. A leaden grey sky hangs oppressively over St. Anastasia’s Roman Catholic Church on 245th St, Queens, as friends and lovers, united in grief, gather to pay their final respects to John Genzale; husband, brother, son and father.

Mariann Bracken has lost the prodigal kid brother she’d introduced to the New York City melodramas of the Shangri-Las when he was just a fresh-faced altar boy. Leee Black Childers is inconsolable – the former manager of the deceased fainted when informed of his death – unable to imagine life without the man he was “totally” in love with.

Susanne Blomqvist, only now realising the true depth of sacrifice her life partner made when he walked out of the home they shared with their infant daughter for the last time, absently registers the names on the cards of the numerous floral tributes piled on the back of a black El Camino: Deborah Harry, Mötley Crüe, Aerosmith – a stark reminder of Genzale’s other life, the one that always seemed to get in the way of their ephemeral moments of domestic bliss.

As the service draws to a close, St. Anastasia’s: reverberates to the sound of You Can’t Put Your Arms Around A Memory. There’s not a dry eye in the house. Johnny Thunders: a Heartbreaker right to the bitter end.

On arrival at the interment, Jerry Nolan – to all intents and purposes his elder brother, father figure and unrequited other half – is handed a rose, which he gently kisses and places with due ceremony on the coffin lid: a poignant tribute, yet brief.

Jerry has been drowning his sorrows with fellow New York Dolls alumnus Sylvain Sylvain, and both, in immediate need of relief, head for a nearby convenience. With nature’s call duly answered, the pair return to the graveside and find it deserted. They made the gig, but missed the encore. The curse of Thunders strikes again.

Jerry looks at Syl, Syl looks at Jerry, and as Syl hurls the first fistful of soil into the grave and onto the coffin lid he yells: “JOHNNY, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!”

Johnny Thunders’s story is so steeped in doomed glamour and junkie mythology that somewhere along the line the man that was John Anthony Genzale has been lost in the telling, but to know one you have to know the other.

Born in the middle-class Jackson Heights area of Queens on July 15, 1952, the boy who would be Thunders was irrevocably shaped in infancy by the departure of his father Emil Genzale. A serial womaniser of no little prowess, Genzale Sr ultimately chose swordsmanship over fatherhood, leaving little Johnny to be brought up by his mother Josephine and doting elder sister Mariann.

Haunted by rejection in his formative years, yet indulged by his matriarchal Italian upbringing, the young Genzale grew up spoiled but unsatisfied. Initially infatuated by baseball, he finally found a focus for his adolescent anger and angst in the perpetual soundtrack of Brill Building rock’n’roll drifting across the hall from his sister’s Dansette; shrill, urban dramas of switchblade romance and leather-clad Lotharios, delivered by keening teenage girls teetering on the brink of hysteria.

As Genzale matured he developed musical tastes that reflected his self-image. A born dandy with a taste for the urban blues, haphazard ebony locks, and a rebellious streak the width of Broadway, it was inevitable that he should come to idolise Keith Richards. Entranced by rock’n’roll, Genzale made the leap from observer to protagonist in his mid-teens.

“Me and my cousin Janis used to go to the Fillmore East every Saturday,” his childhood friend Gail Higgins remembers. “Johnny and his friends would be on one side of the room, and we’d be on the other, staring at each other.”

The 16-year old Johnny and Janis eventually started dating. They rented an apartment on New York’s First Avenue, where Johnny took up the bass. They caught shows by The Who, The Hollies and Small Faces, they drank beer with Rod Stewart backstage at the Newport Folk Festival, and Johnny was even captured on film gazing in awe at Keith from the front row of Madison Square Garden in the Rolling Stones’ Gimme Shelter. In 1969 they travelled to London to sample the scene. But it was the sound of Detroit that particularly struck a chord with Johnny.

“We would drive eight hours to see the MC5 or The Stooges,” Gail attests. It wasn’t long before Johnny abandoned the bass and set about learning the guitar. “Whenever he was practising, I used to yell into the bedroom: ‘Give up, Johnny’,” says Higgins.

Never one to blend into his surroundings, Johnny always stood out from the crowd: long, spiky hair, and a penchant for borrowing his girlfriend’s clothes. His style was extreme. “He had high-heeled boots, velvet jackets and pants, bowling gear,” says Heartbreaker Walter Lure. “I’d see him at all the shows – mostly the British bands, as opposed to the Grateful Deads and Jefferson Airplanes – so I’d seen him around for years. Then when the Dolls started happening I said: ‘Holy shit! There’s that guy.’”

The New York Dolls’ seismic effect on rock’n’roll has already been covered in forensic detail elsewhere. Suffice to say, in the admirably concise words of Richard Hell, “The Dolls were for New York groups what the Sex Pistols were for British groups.”

The Dolls’ rapid ascent from Manhattan drag bars to Wembley Empire Pool (now the Arena) elevated the expectations of the newly renamed Johnny Thunders through the roof. Tragically, though, his relatively short tenure with the Dolls spoiled him in ways that were far more damaging.

On November 7, 1972, in London after supporting The Faces at Wembley, Dolls drummer Billy Murcia was accidentally drowned by party-goers trying to arouse him from a certainly survivable champagne and Mandrax haze by immersing him in a bath of cold water.

It was a messy, senseless and avoidable death that left the band shell-shocked. Gail Higgins: “Johnny was devastated. He was the closest with Billy and it really upset him. Johnny was very sensitive and loving, very needy and very insecure.”

“Billy’s death was the beginning of the end for the Dolls,” believes Leee Black Childers, then Vice President of MainMan, the management company that looked after David Bowie. “Because then Jerry Nolan came in, and Jerry was so self-destructive. He addicted Johnny Thunders to heroin.”

“Jerry was seven years older than Johnny and their relationship was more than just brothers,” says Nolan’s former partner, NYC punk scenester Phyllis Stein. “At times, as Jerry would tell me, he felt like Johnny’s father.”

“It was real father-and-son type stuff,” agrees Walter Lure, “because Johnny would look to Jerry for approval. In the Dolls, when John got out of control on drugs, the band would ask Jerry to take him into a room and give him a couple of whacks to the head, and John would calm down. I saw Jerry go up to John and say: ‘Listen, you wanna get a smack in the head?’”

Gail Higgins: “Jerry was very, very protective of Johnny. He was the older guy. Obviously they did drugs together, but they had a love-hate relationship, they fought all the time, but they loved each other deeply.”

Leee Black Childers: “Johnny and Jerry were one of the great unrequited love affairs. They fought like lovers, broke up like lovers, reunited like lovers. Jerry would manipulate Johnny, making him crazy, then Johnny would break down in tears and Jerry would storm off, and Johnny would lay in my lap crying: ‘Where’s Jerry? I can’t live without him, I can’t work without him, I can’t be without him.’ That sounds like lovers to me.”

It wasn’t just brotherly love, fatherly discipline and a solid backbeat that Jerry Nolan brought to Thunders’s emotionally charged, high-pressure lifestyle. The drummer was an evangelistic user of heroin, and Johnny a willing convert. Still distraught from Billy Murcia’s death, and eager to impress the worldly Nolan, the guitarist took to heroin like a duck to water. Thunders wasn’t clean prior to Jerry’s arrival – he’d been previously introduced to smack by a pair of A-list rockers still working today – but it was allegedly Jerry that recommended regular fixing to Thunders as an answer to all that ultimately ailed him.

Gail Higgins: “He started taking downers first, he didn’t suddenly start taking heroin. It was a mask, he was insecure and the type of person who just cannot be happy.”

“Shyness is one of the reasons why I got involved with smack,” says former Heartbreakers bassist Billy Rath. “And smack helped to remove Johnny’s shyness. One of the reasons he never really pursued getting himself together was because he felt that if he cleaned up and got rid of his habit he couldn’t be Johnny Thunders any more.”

But while heroin was helping Thunders to cope, it wasn’t without its side effects. Before drugs took hold, the guitarist was quiet and meek. When he started taking heroin he became obnoxious. Sylvain Sylvain: “When he became a junkie he turned into a fucking monster and it made him aggressive for no reason, because everything is boring until you’ve had a fucking fix. It rules everything and it ruins everything.”

As the New York Dolls’ career steadily unravelled, a junk-sick Thunders and Nolan bailed on the band in Florida in 1975, returning to New York to make their connection. As Dolls vocalist David Johansen eruditely understates it: “The problem with [heroin addiction] is that a person in that condition has to have their medicine available. So it limits one’s mobility, not to mention the myriad other things it limits. So you can’t travel freely, because you have to be looked after in that department.”

The shattered Dolls returned to Norfolk Street, scored some Chinese rocks, and prepared to break some more hearts.

Following a false start with Television bassist Richard Hell, Thunders’s new band, The Heartbreakers (now comprising their classic, fat-free Thunders/Lure/Rath/Nolan line-up) casually wowed New York City’s club scene. But it soon became clear that no American record company was ever going to sign a band that featured Thunders and Nolan. Enter Malcolm McLaren offering a UK tour slot supporting the Sex Pistols. The Heartbreakers practically bit his arm off.

The band arrived in Britain on December 1, 1976, the day the Pistols appeared on Bill Grundy’s Today show. Consequently the majority of the tour they had flown in to play was cancelled in a blaze of tabloid headlines. Leee Black Childers had become their manager by this point.

“We were freezing,” he says. “The Heartbreakers, Sex Pistols and Clash on this rickety old bus. Johnny couldn’t care less, he’s laughing, carrying on. He kept the spirits up on the bus. It was like the old days of vaudeville – the show must go on.”

Returning to London broke, and, consequently clean, The Heartbreakers made an appearance at the Roxy club attended by all the prime movers of the nascent UK punk scene. But it was more than just a winning personality and a crack band that Thunders brought to London’s punk rock party. Glen Matlock: “Until The Heartbreakers turned up in London I hadn’t heard the word ‘heroin’ mentioned in our circle.”

Steve Dior a was fan of the Dolls who later became Thunders’s protégé. He was 17 when he saw The Heartbreakers at The Roxy. “I was standing in front of Thunders, at the front of the Roxy stage, studying him,” he says. “I went to the dressing room, poked my head in, Johnny looked at me and said: ‘Are you famous or something?’ And Jerry said: ‘He fucking looks like you.’

“I started hanging out with them. Johnny decided to teach me to play like him. Then he found out that I was banging up speed and said: ‘Come on, kid, you wanna be doing the real shit.’ He took me in hand. But there was a price to pay: ‘You wanna play like me? You’ve gotta party with me. How much money you got?’ I put in about a hundred, we went up to Mayfair and that’s where we did it.”

Thunders’s drug problems, meanwhile, only worsened. Leee Black Childers: “We would have a bucket behind the amp, so he could go over and throw up. But then he would go right back and put on the most amazing shows. At one point he was supposed to be on Methadone. I would measure out his ounce of Methadone and watch him drink it in front of me. But he’d keep the methadone in his cheeks and spit it into a cup, until he had a week’s worth. He was using heroin, and saving the Methadone so that he could have a big weekly high as well.”

It was at this point that Johnny decided to fly his soon-to-be wife Julie Jordan, John Jr (Julie’s two- year-old, from a previous relationship) and their baby, Vito, to London. Having dated since The Heartbreakers’ early days, the couple married on August 16, 1977.

“It was fucked up,” remembers Walter Lure.“They got married in New York, and they were both throwing up in the back of the limousine because they had too much drugs. Julie was a pretty girl but she also had serious mental issues.” Gail Higgins: “That was one of his ‘If I have a family, I’ll be happy’ moments. What can I say? She did nothing, knew nothing, didn’t add anything. But because of Johnny’s insecurity he wanted her to be there every minute, and that caused friction with the rest of the band.”

Leee Black Childers: “Julie wanted to rule the roost but she didn’t know how. I only knew the babies as toddlers. Vito was just crawling. Johnny called him The Sprog.”

Phyllis Stein: “Jerry refused to attend Johnny’s wedding because he felt Johnny was making a mistake.”

During the chaotic summer of 1977 The Heartbreakers, with the appositely named Speedy Keen at the controls, holed up in The Who’s Ramport Studio in south London to record their single shot at vinyl immortality. L.A.M.F. (Like A Mother Fucker) was the muffled sound of a watertight live band drowning in a sea of over- produced mud; the mix was so bad that The Heartbreakers ultimately split.

“That mix can be completely laid at the door of Jerry Nolan.” says Leee Black Childers, “He went into this kind of control freak thing where he had to mix it. But everyone was stoned. Walking into the studio was like walking into a crack house. I should have gotten a gun and shot a couple of them dead.”

Walter Lure: “We were told we needed to release it in time for Christmas because they needed to make some money. So they just put us in a room and said if it doesn’t get released you’re not gonna have a contract. Johnny, Billy and I said yeah; Jerry said no, he was leaving, and just walked out.”

Nolan didn’t just walk out on Thunders; he took his protégé Steve Dior with him. With Barry Jones on second guitar and the New York Dolls’ Arthur Kane on bass, Nolan’s band The Idols were soon the toast of New York City. The Heartbreakers soldiered on, but Thunders was devastated by what he saw as his closest friend’s betrayal. Leee Black Childers remembers the moment he quit as The Heartbreakers manager: “Johnny came up to me and just looked with those huge, dark eyes of his, put his arms around me and said: ‘I know what you wanna do and it’s okay, I’m okay.’ He hugged me really tight. And when he hugged you he wouldn’t let go. He would just hold on and on. And then finally when he let go, that was it, that’s how I left the Heartbreakers.”

Now ostensibly solo, the guitarist took to playing guerrilla gigs around London with an all-star cast of eager celebrity fans, including Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Phil Lynott, Peter Perrett and Sid Vicious, some of whom shared a certain predilection. Thunders wanted to call this ramshackle revue The Junkies but, shot down in flames by his latest manager, BP Fallon, opted instead for The Living Dead. Steve Jones: “The times that me and Cooky played with him, he just fucked off with the money. We accepted it because that’s the way he was – just get a bit of cash to get a bit of dope and that’s all he really cares about. Unfortunately it just got worse and worse and he got lower and lower.

The album that grew out of The Living Dead gigs turned out to be something of a classic. So Alone, released in 1978, was bolstered by Chrissie Hynde, Steve Marriott and Brooklyn chanteuse Patti Palladin. Conspicuous by his absence was Sid Vicious, who had by now decamped to New York City to make some live appearances, backed by The Idols. Vicious’s subsequent death had a devastating effect on Johnny.

Peter Perrett: “He wrote Sad Vacation about Sid. He was Sid’s hero, so I guess he felt a little bit guilty because Sid went down that road because he wanted to be like Johnny.”

Upon returning to the US, Thunders and family set up home in Dexter, Michigan. The guitarist hooked up with his teen idol, MC5 guitarist Wayne Kramer, to form Gang War. But the project was doomed to failure.

Kramer: “Johnny was impossible to work with because he had another job that was more important. It’s the way heroin addiction works – you can’t do anything until you cop. I thought I could fix it. And of course I can’t fix anyone but Wayne. And I can hardly even fix Wayne by myself.”

It was at this point that Julie unexpectedly left with John Jnr, Vito and new-born baby Dino. Johnny would never see his children again.

By the early 80s, Thunders had hit an all- time low, haunting the New York streets, hawking licks for chump change, looking for a fix. “He was walking death,” says Aerosmith’s Joe Perry, who shared management with the New York Dolls in the early 70s. “Every time I ran into him he was desperately trying to get from hour to hour. You’d hear that he’d tried to clean up and then he’d be back living on the street again.”

Barry Jones: “I once got an earful from his mother when he’d told her his hand was infected. So I took him to Beth Israel, and they said if he hadn’t come in that night he’d have lost his hand. He’d missed, shooting Tuinal, and his hand had blown up like a crusty balloon… He told his mother he caught it in a cab door.”

Enter Christopher Giercke, enigmatic German entrepreneur, producer of such films as Cocaine Cowboys, and latterly founder President of The Genghis Khan Polo And Riding Club, Kathmandu, who met Thunders at photographer Marcia Resnick’s New York loft in the spring of 1981.“He was bright, charming and quick-witted,” says Giercke. “Especially when he had his drugs of choice, which unfortunately for him, and everyone who cared for him, involved heroin. At that point he probably consumed two grams a day.”

Thunders, now reunited with Nolan, invited Giercke to watch him play at the Peppermint Lounge. But the gig was cancelled due to the fact that the band had pawned all of their instruments.

“Of course, this was a rather pitiful period in his career,” Giercke deadpans, “And, optimistically, I told him that I could change his predicament.”

Giercke offered Thunders a place to live below his loft, naively thinking the guitarist “just had to learn to take better drugs”. Thunders was unable to keep a band together, but Giercke could help find him gigs.

“He had Jerry Nolan and Walter Lure around, and they were comfortable to work as long as I handled the money,” says Giercke. “Johnny had the habit of collecting advances, not sharing them with the other players, and often not turning up when required. His continuing relationship with Jerry was important for the band but disastrous for me in my attempt to get Johnny away from heroin. Johnny would enjoy good wines, smoke and cocaine, but Jerry insisted on heroin.”

Thunders, it appeared, had finally found a father figure he could trust and depend on. But could he reciprocate in kind? It was doubtful that Johnny Thunders had it in him. But what of John Genzale? Could anyone reach the man behind the mask?

Susanne Blomqvist, a 20-year old Swedish hairdresser, first met Johnny Thunders in Stockholm after catching him playing a gig with Hanoi Rocks in 1983. The following night a mutual friend called her up and invited her to see Johnny play again. She accepted, and on arrival went backstage, where Thunders could manage only a somewhat bashful ‘Hello’.

“It was really cute,” says Susanne. “He was a very sweet man behind everything. I didn’t fall in love with him right away, but his shyness and vulnerability really touched me.”

When it was time for Thunders to take to the stage, he ordered everyone except Susanne out of the dressing room. He then refused to perform unless Giercke persuaded her to come out on to the stage in her home town and be introduced to the audience by Johnny as his ‘Swedish wife’.

After nearly an hour, Susanne complied. “I was only 20, just a kid. Johnny was 30. We were two metres apart on that stage, and that’s pretty much how we stayed for the next seven years. He was a true gentleman with a good heart. He was into heavy drugs, and I knew that, but he didn’t want me to try anything. He protected me from that. He was also very romantic, with flowers and presents. He took me out to dinner and treated me as a princess. It was true love between us.”

Christopher Giercke, realising that the strictures imposed upon recovering heroin addicts in the US (Methadone doses were administered in the street to addicts by armed police officers) were demeaning and counter-productive, had already relocated Johnny to Paris. But after filming the lead in director Patrick Grandperret’s Mona Et Moi in the city, Johnny set up home with Susanne in Sweden.

After 10 years as the barely breathing embodiment of heroin chic, Johnny Thunders set about rebuilding his shattered life and re-establishing contact with the inner John Genzale that he’d suppressed for so long. Susanne Blomqvist: “He loved cooking, he was a true Italian. He loved spaghetti and tomato sauce, and making soups. He really enjoyed staying at home and reading his Herald Tribune. He was a very sensitive, intelligent man.”

“Johnny read a lot,” says Stevie Klasson, guitarist with Thunders’s final touring band, the Oddballs. “Autobiographies of Noriega and Howard Hughes. He’d always have books on politics and religion in his saddlebags. He was fascinated by a book about the Catholic church called In God’s Name [by David A Yallop].”

“Johnny was really Catholic,” says Susanne. “He didn’t want me to have too-short skirts and show too much skin. I know he was praying, and many times he made the sign of the cross. We went to many different Catholic churches. He wanted our daughter raised as a true Catholic, she was baptised as a Catholic. He went to confession when he was younger, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if he still did that and didn’t tell anybody.”

By 1986, Christopher Giercke’s role was diminishing as Johnny gradually regained control of his life and career (having released the acoustic Hurt Me album and its return-to-form, all-guns-blazing follow-up Que Sera Sera in rapid succession). He had finally re-established contact with his mother and sister, but had still heard absolutely nothing from Julie concerning the state of health and whereabouts of their two young sons, Vito and Dino. Johnny knew the pain of an absentee father, and feared his sons would consider his enforced absence from their lives as cold rejection.

Susanne: “He missed his kids. It was hurting him so much. He didn’t know where they were but he was thinking of them every day. I think he got a lot of his sorrow and anger out when playing music.” Returning to the road may have been therapeutic, but slipping back into the skin of obnoxious, junkie wastrel Thunders was becoming an increasingly painful process. Susanne Blomqvist: “He hated going on the road. He just wanted to stay home, read his books and watch films.”

Now finally weaned from heroin to Methadone, John would have to metamorphose into his stage persona by other means. “We were on the train to the gig,” Oddballs vocalist Alison Gordy remembers. “Johnny’s playing cards with Stevie, and he starts becoming Johnny Thunders. He started twitching. I went over and said: ‘Johnny! You’re becoming him.’ He said: ‘Yeah.’ He didn’t do any drugs, but I could see a physical change coming over him. It was an interesting transformation; suddenly he was all jazzed up.”

Some sections of his audience didn’t want to see Thunders clean, they’d come to see the mythic smack zombie of legend. “It was so sad sometimes when Johnny was in great shape and you could see these vultures’ disappointment,” says Stevie Klasson. “They’d be calling out for Junkie Business and throwing loaded syringes on stage. Johnny Thunders was sick and tired of being Johnny Thunders. He wanted to be an entertainer and have a great band.”

Thunders, determined to give the kids exactly what they wanted, even started to fake it. Glen Matlock: “I remember seeing him backstage at the 100 Club. We had a chat and then he said: ‘We’re going on now,’ so I went out the front. And in the minute it took him to walk to the stage, he went from being completely compos mentis to falling over. It was like an act.”

“He would absolutely do that,” confirms Gail Higgins, “That little stumble as he walked on stage was a definite put-on. He knew what they wanted. At the end he’d say: ‘They’ve come to see me die.’ Which must have been sad for him.” Susanne Blomqvist: “I can remember him winking at me from the stage to say: ‘I’m okay, even if I’m acting fucked-up,’ Maybe I’m taking his pants off here… maybe people will be disappointed, but he really wasn’t that fucked-up on stage.”

Johnny was suddenly so together he was even offering wise counsel to others. Stevie Klasson: “He was very protective, especially when it came to drugs. He didn’t want me to make the same mistakes that he had done. I asked him early on for some smack and he gave me a smack in the mouth.”

Peter Perrett: “In the 80s, Johnny would come around and tell me I was wasting my talent.”

Johnny Thunders’s transformation from burned-out casualty to rehabilitated contender, appeared to culminate with the birth of Jamie Genzale in 1987, just as work was being completed on Copy Cats, a collaborative collection of formative covers with Patti Palladin that represented the finest, most complete body of work to bear the Thunders name since So Alone.

As he returned to Sweden for the birth, it seemed that Johnny was finally in a position to be a real father at last; to break the cycle of parental abandonment that had dogged and defined his entire life. But, deep down, something was wrong. Susanne Blomqvist: “When Jamie was born I could feel that he didn’t want to get too close to her. He was very proud, and he took care of her, but at the same time I could see that he was scared to be a parent again… scared of hurting her. He couldn’t stand the thought that we weren’t going to get old together, as a family. He didn’t want to repeat the same thing his father did to him.”

If Thunders’s reticence to commit might have seemed irrational, his next move was inexplicable. Until you realise he was harbouring a dark secret. Not long after Jamie’s birth, Johnny Thunders had been diagnosed with leukaemia. Susanne Blomqvist: “We separated when Jamie was one-and-a-half years old, and he moved back to New York. I drove him out to the airport, we said goodbye, and I knew I was never going to see him again. He went to see a doctor once and they took some tests, and something changed. I said: ‘Something is not okay with you.’ He said: ‘Oh, it was okay, it was nothing.’

“But then he started behaving in a way that made him unbearable to have around. He wasn’t hurting me or anything like that, he just wasn’t the homey guy any more – the guy who wants to cook the chicken soup, or go and rent a film… He was showing me less and less of John, and resorting to Johnny Thunders. That must have been very painful for him, because he didn’t want to be Johnny Thunders, he wanted to be the father, the husband, the good friend, the best friend, but to stand the pain he had to choose that role.

“He knew something that I didn’t know, that nobody knew: that he wouldn’t live too long. That’s how protective he was over me and Jamie. He was saving us. I think of him every day and I miss him every single day. He’s still in my heart. I’m so grateful that we had those years together and we had beautiful Jamie. I never saw John as Johnny Thunders. For me he was John. John Genzale. And nobody else.”

Thunders returned to the road with a vengeance in the last year of his life. In the spring of ’91, following lucrative gigs in Japan, he ended up in New Orleans intent on fulfilling his ultimate musical ambition.

“The plan was to hire Sea-Saint studios,” says Stevie Klasson, “get Jerry Nolan back on the drum stool, and fly Alison Gordy down once we’d settled in. Johnny was hoping to rope Dr John and John Campbell into the equation. For years it was Johnny’s big dream to record a New Orleans record.”

But Thunders never got to record his New Orleans record. He was found dead in room 37 of St. Peter House, New Orleans on the afternoon of April 23, 1991. He was 38 years old. The exact circumstances of his death remain inconclusive and the subject of much conjecture. But it seems his leukaemia-weakened body went into seizure on the night of the 22nd, and his new-found companions, possibly convinced they’d either supplied him with the chemical high that had killed him or who were holding enough chemicals to make it appear that this was the case when the cops came calling, simply left him to die.

Thunders’s body was taken back to New York for his funeral. The presence at the service of 13-year-old Vito Genzale – Thunders’s son from his first marriage, formerly known as The Sprog – almost stopped Lee Black Childers’s heart; the resemblance was so strong. Vito and his brother Dino hadn’t been told who their father was. Alison Gordy took Vito aside, sat him down and told him: “You’re going to hear a lot about your father, but don’t believe everything you hear, because I want you to know that he was a really funny, smart, great person.”

Jerry Nolan was hit hard by Thunders’s death. “I answered the phone and this guy’s crying, and it’s Jerry,” says Steve Dior. “And I’m like: ‘Oh my god, Jerry’s crying.’ And he doesn’t cry. He’s bawling his head off worrying that Johnny didn’t know how much he loved him.”

Nolan died following a massive stroke brought on by bacterial pneumonia and meningitis on January 14, 1992, less than a year after Thunders. Susanne Blomqvist: “They were like an old couple who’d been married for a hundred years. It was like they couldn’t live with or without one other. Jerry took a big responsibility for Johnny, and I believe that deep down Jerry missed Johnny so much that he died within the year.”

When Thunders died, Nolan asked the guitarist’s sister, Mariann Bracken, that if anything happened to him could he be buried next to Johnny. Today the pair occupy adjacent plots in St. Mary’s Cemetery, Queens.“You had to separate Johnny Thunders from the real Johnny, says Billy Rath.

“Underneath that veneer was a loving father, a loving man and a good guy to be with. He was a very lonely person because of carrying that persona and losing everybody he held dear. That song So Alone fits him so well. He felt very alone.”

So what became of The Sprog? Abandoned in infancy, his ultimate legacy would appear to be a similarly troubled soul to that of his father. On discovering that he was the estranged son of Johnny Thunders, Vito Genzale tried to live up to his legend. In early 2011 he made parole from Sing Sing Correctional Facility after serving four-and-a-half years for criminal sale of a controlled substance.

This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 158 (June 2011)

Classic Rock’s Reviews Editor for the last 20 years, Ian stapled his first fanzine in 1977. Since misspending his youth by way of ‘research’ his work has also appeared in such publications as Metal Hammer, Prog, NME, Uncut, Kerrang!, VOX, The Face, The Guardian, Total Guitar, Guitarist, Electronic Sound, Record Collector and across the internet. Permanently buried under mountains of recorded media, ears ringing from a lifetime of gigs, he enjoys nothing more than recreationally throttling a guitar and following a baptism of punk fire has played in bands for 45 years, releasing recordings via Esoteric Antenna and Cleopatra Records.

Fontaines D.C. have announced a huge outdoor show in Belfast, with local heroes Kneecap supporting.

The Irish bands will play Boucher Road Playing Fields on August 29 as part of the 2025 edition of Belfast Vital.

Tickets for the gig will go on sale on Friday, April 25), with pre-sales available to those who sign up to the Dublin band’s mailing list before 8am on April 23.

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Last week, Grian Chatten’s band announced a special one-off homecoming show in Dublin with Lankum.

The two Irish bands were the first to be announced for Lovely Days Live at the Home of Guinness, which Guinness is billing as “an unforgettable 3-day music, food and culture experience”, featuring “Ireland’s hottest musical talent alongside global sensations”.

Lovely Days Live will run from May 23-25 at the Guinness Storehouse at St. James’s Gate, Dublin, with Fontaines D.C. and Lankum playing on May 25.

Meanwhile, Kneecap’s appearance at Coachella festival at the weekend has caused headlines in the US media due to the Belfast band’s continued uncompromising support of the Palestinian people.

During the trio’s set on the festival’s Sonora Tent, rapper Mo Chara told the audience, “The Irish, not so long ago, were persecuted under the Brits, but we were never bombed from the fucking skies with nowhere to go. The Palestinians have nowhere to go, it’s their fucking home, and they’re bombing them from the skies. If you”re not calling it a genocide, what the fuck are you calling it?’

The band also displayed pro-Palestinian messages onstage, including one stating “Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. It is being enabled by the U.S. government who arm and fund Israel despite their war crimes.”

The band’s statements drew the ire of right-wing broadcasters at Fox News, with anti-trans conservative commentator Riley Gaines displaying a curious logic in stating, “If they want to be for the Palestinian people, then they shouldn’t be anti-Israel.”

Other pro-Israel commentators have called for the Irish band’s visas to play gigs in the US to be revoked.

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.